美国文学考试重点

American Romanticism (美国浪漫主义): it stretch from the end of the 18th century to outbreak of the Civil War. Its chief emphasis freedom, individualism and imagination. an innate, subjective, and intuitive perception of man. The representatives about romanticism period included Irving欧文, Cooper库珀and Bryant.布莱恩特9

American naturalism (美国自然主义): A particular school of philosophy popular in the late 19th century, usually defined as pessimistic determinism. It conceives of man as controlled by his instincts or his passions, or by his social and economic environment and circumstances. The most important writers of this movement include Crane, Norris, London and Dreiser. ·德莱塞

American realism (美国现实主义): A movement that sprang up in the latter half of the 19th century, which aims at an interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. The three leading figures are William Dean

Howells威廉·狄恩·豪威尔斯, Mark Twain马克·吐温, and Henry James.

Local Colorism(乡土色彩): A movement which came into prominence in the U.S. after

the Civil War, perhaps as an attempt to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities by which people can tell it apart from the world outside. The fiction or verse emphasizes its setting, being concerned with the character of a district or of an era, as marked by its customs, dialect, costumes, landscape, etc. The distinguished writers of local colorism include Mark Twain马克·吐温, Bret Harte, Willa Cather, Hamlin Garland.

The Lost Generation (迷惘的一代)：After the first World War. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world. The most well-known figures in “the Lost Generation” are Ezra Pound埃兹拉庞德, Ernest Hemingway欧内斯特·海明威, F. Scott Fitzgerald,弗朗西斯·菲茨杰拉德

Southern Renaissance (南方文艺复兴): A term to describe the revival of American Southern literature from the 1920s and 1930s to the 1950s. Most of the writings deal with the struggle between those who embraced social changes and those who were skeptical and conservative or challenged social change outright. The writers were engaged in an attempt to come to terms not only with the inherited values of the Southern tradition, but also with a certain way of perceiving and dealing with the past. William Faulkner,威廉·福克纳Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams are among the most distinguished writers in the early 20th century.

二、作家、作品

1、Benjamin Franklin 本杰明·富兰克林1733-1758 (发明避雷针、双镜片眼镜)--colonial period(殖民时期1607—1775)

"Poor Richard's Almanac"（穷人查理德的年鉴）——The Way to Wealth （致富之道）；The Autobiography （自传）

1.Why did Franklin write his Autobiography?